


Saint Frost

by aesthetic_shitpost



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, so you know those fics where jack is also the saint of suicides?, yeah - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-04 19:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15154316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aesthetic_shitpost/pseuds/aesthetic_shitpost
Summary: The tale is an old one, whispered down through children and believers for generations. It tells of a spirit, a saint, who would come when you were weary and ease your worldly pain. To call him, one must stand at least ankle-deep in water and call his name three times.Saint Frost, Saint Frost, Saint Frost.-the one where i write for dead fandoms now apparently





	Saint Frost

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so i know this fandom is probably dead in 2018, but i've been reading some fics and i just could not get this concept out of my head. i just had to do it myself. based on a prompt from the rotg kinkmeme thing that i'm not actually a part of but w/e

Ankle-deep in the river, she waits.

 

The tale is an old one, whispered down through children and believers for generations. It tells of a spirit, a saint, who would come when you were weary and ease your worldly pain. To call him, one must stand at least ankle-deep in water and call his name three times.

 

_ Saint Frost, Saint Frost, Saint Frost. _

 

Now she waits.

 

She knew what else the children had told her, too - that you had to be sure when you called him, because there were no tales of anyone meeting him and staying alive. 

 

She is sure. 

 

It only takes a minute for the wind to pick up a chill and a quiet flurry to start falling. (A minute isn’t a long time to wait, in the grand scheme of things. Although, in comparison to the rest of her life, it is a long time that should be savoured wisely. She does.)

 

Even though she had been waiting for him, she can’t see where he comes from - she blinks, and all of a sudden, there he is, as if he had appeared from the falling snow.

 

In the stories she had been told, there hadn’t been much elaboration on his appearance.  _ I heard he died in a frozen lake, and you can still tell,  _ one had said.  _ That’s why he’s the saint of suicides. _

 

She can tell. 

 

His skin holds an unhealthy pallor that errs more on the side of gray than anything else. His lips are as blue as his eyes, and his hair is as white as snow, a shade only a little lighter than his face. He wears a frostbitten hoodie and a pair of brown pants that look as though they’re from vastly different periods in time. In his hand is a roughly hewn shepherd’s crook that glows with frost wherever he touches it. But perhaps what catches her most off-guard is his age - or rather, his  _ apparent _ age. He looks like he is maybe sixteen, seventeen at the most. 

 

_ He must have died awfully young, _ she thinks.  _ Like I’m going to. _

 

“You came,” she says. She had known he would, but doubt is a pest at the best of times, and these are far from it.

 

He nods, expression grave. “I always come when you call.” His voice reminds her of winter winds and the crackle of stepping on freshly frosted grass.

 

She swallows. She hasn’t changed her mind, but being this close to her death and knowing it… it isn’t easy, even though she had made the decision a long time ago. She just hadn’t had the courage to act on it until tonight.

 

Unable to find any words to say, she simply holds out a hand to him, her Saint.

 

His face changes in a soft, undefinable way. He reaches out and takes her hand in return. His touch sends a chill through her. It makes everything in that moment feel more real. The texture of his skin against hers, the puff of her last few breaths in the air, the startling brightness of his blue eyes compared to the rest of his pale body.

 

Saint Frost pulls her closer to him, so that she can reach out and touch him easily if she wants to. 

 

She doesn’t.

 

He looks down at her and she knows that his face would be one of the last things she would ever see - but she had known that as soon as she had decided to call him.

 

“Are you ready?” He asks, in that wintry voice of his. 

 

“Yes,” she breathes. 

 

He nods in acknowledgement and leans in. 

 

In all the tales they told her, there were only a few things that everyone could agree on: how to call him, and how he kills you. He kills you with a kiss, they said. A kiss so cold that it draws your breath right out of your body. 

 

As his lips descend upon hers, she can feel her breath being pulled out of her. With her last gasp of air, she tells him her last words: “Thank you.”

 

-oOo-

 

This time, the call isn’t far away. Jack feels it in his veins, a need to be  _ there, _ only  _ there _ wasn’t miles away like it usually was. This time, the call comes from his own town of Burgess, Pennsylvania - the town about to add another name to its list of dead.

 

Jack flies to a stream that feeds into the lake where he died to find a girl standing in the water. She is young and she is ready, and it is all over too soon. After he kisses her and steals the last breath from her lungs, he catches her limp body and places it on the ground beside the stream. He closes her eyes and covers her body with a thin sheen of frost; not enough to actually freeze her, but enough to get the point across. 

 

His work here is done. He flies back to his grave.

 

-oOo-

 

A few days later, Jamie tells him about the girl in his class who died. “They found her in the woods,” he says. “They couldn’t tell what had killed her, but it doesn’t really matter, does it? It just matters that she’s gone. I never even had a real conversation with her…” He swallows painfully. “And now I’ll never get to.”

 

Jack leans closer to him and takes him into his arms with guilt a heavy weight in his chest. “Sometimes that’s just the way the world is,” he tells his first believer. “Sometimes people have to die.”

 

“She didn’t  _ have _ to do anything,” Jamie retorts, scowling up at him. “It’s unfair! She wasn’t even in high school yet! She had so much ahead of her…”

 

Jack sighs and wraps the boy in his arms as Jamie starts to cry. There is nothing he can say to make him feel better that wouldn’t make himself feel worse.

 

-oOo-

 

When Jack comes in Jamie’s open window the next day, there is no prelude to the thinly veiled accusation thrown at him.

 

“They figured out a cause of death,” Jamie says, not turning around. “Hypothermia. But it’s the middle of April, Jack.” He turns to face him. “There’s no natural way that she could have frozen to death in spring.” 

 

Jack stays near the window, the temperature in the room steadily dropping on account of his growing panic - panic at being found out by his first (real) believer, by his closest (human) friend.

 

“Maybe the river had some icy water from higher up in the mountains,” Jack says carefully. “If she had fallen in, that would be natural.”

 

“I didn’t tell you she was near the river.” Jamie’s eyes narrow. “And the river is more like a stream. It barely even goes up to my knees, it’s hardly a river that you could fall and die in.”

 

After a moment of tension, Jack looks down. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he admits.

 

“I want you to tell me that you didn’t go into the woods and kill an innocent girl!” Jamie shouts. “I want you to tell me that you didn’t betray everything you and the guardians stand for!” He deflates, the anger going out of him like the air of a popped balloon. “I want you to tell me that you’re still something worth believing in.”

 

And isn’t that just a punch in the gut? The worst punch, in fact, that Jack had ever gotten, even worse than when he realized three hundred years ago that the only people who could see him were the people that wanted to die, that the only people he could talk to were people who wouldn’t be talking much longer.

 

“Jamie,” he begins, “I can’t tell you what’s worth believing in. But -”

 

“So you did kill her.” Jamie’s voice is low and simmering with rage. “Why?” He screams. “What did she do to deserve that, to deserve  _ death? _ How many others have you -”

 

“I didn’t have a choice!” Jack yells. “She asked! She  _ asked _ to die.”

 

Jamie’s stunned face morphs into disgusted disbelief. “So what, she just walked up to you in the woods and said, ‘please kill me?’”

 

“Well, no,” Jack says. “But when they call, it’s only ever for one reason.”

 

“‘ _ They?’ _ You can be summoned? But wait, I thought  _ I _ was your first believer!”

 

“You were… in a way,” Jack says. “You were the first person to believe in Jack Frost.”

 

“So what do they believe in?”

 

Jack sighs and looks away from Jamie. “They call me Saint Frost,” he confesses. “The saint of suicides.” The sudden silence in the room is deafening, and Jack carefully avoids looking anywhere near Jamie as he continues. “I don’t know why it started. I just know that one day, there was a girl in the woods. She had her feet in the water of my lake, because I hadn’t started freezing it yet. She saw me, Jamie.” His voice softens. “She  _ saw _ me.” He swallows. The memory still brings pain with it, even three hundred years later. “I don’t know what she believed in to be able to see me, because I had been Jack Frost for maybe a year, but she saw me. And she told me what troubled her. She told me that last year, her brother had drowned in that very lake, and every day without him was harder than the last. She told me -” His voice cracks. “She told me that she didn’t want to keep living anymore. So,” he says, “I took her into my arms and kissed her on the forehead and then she died. I didn’t know that that would happen!” He exclaims. “I just meant to comfort her!” Jack laughs wetly, a broken sound. “I didn’t realize it then, but after I got my memories back… I realized that she was my sister.  _ My sister,” _ he says, “And I killed her.” He sits there wallowing in his own sorrow for a moment before clearing his throat and moving on, still avoiding any eye contact with Jamie. “After that, people starting calling me. I don’t know who got my name and started spreading rumors, but somehow I got to be known as Saint Frost. All you have to do to call me is call my name three times while standing ankle-deep in water. I’m not sure why the water thing, I think it might be because of the winter and ice thing…? Anyway, those people are the only reason that I survived those three hundred years. Without believers, I would have faded away. Maybe they weren’t the believers that I wanted -” He shrugs. “But at least I had them.”

 

“So… that girl. In the forest. She… called you?” Jamie asks. There are a lot of emotions in his voice, but the most prominent is disbelief.

 

“Yes.” Jack turns to face him, but still avoids looking at him directly.

 

“How many?” He asks sharply. “Did you even try to stop them?”

 

Jack sighs. “I can, uh, sense how close they are to death. I think it’s a side effect of the job. Some of them, I can just stay with and persuade them to keep living, but others…” He heaves a deep, sorrowful breath. “All I can do is offer them the mercy of a painless death.”   
  
“So you just give them up as a lost cause?”

 

“I do what I can to make sure that they don’t do it themselves!” Jack yells. “It’s a small mercy,” he whispers. “But it’s the best I can do.”

 

After a full minute with no reply from Jamie, Jack risks a glance up and finds the boy deep in thought. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he whispers, and flies out the window.

 

-oOo-

 

Jack settles tentatively on Jamie’s bed, the boy himself sitting beside him. 

 

“I don’t know if I can ever look at you the same way again,” Jamie says bluntly. 

 

Jack feels something inside of him shatter. “Oh,” he chokes out. “I see. I’ll just -” He gets up to go but is stopped by a small hand gripping his.

 

“But you’re still the same Jack I’m friends with. I just need to get used to this other side of you.” Jack grins in relief and sits back down on the bed, closer to Jamie this time.

 

“So you’re okay with it?” He asks. “With - with me?”

 

“Not really,” Jamie admits. “But enough to still want to be your friend. I guess it’s not really my business what you do when I’m not around.”

 

“Jamie,” Jack says, pulling back so he can look him in the eye, “I’m not just taking up a new hobby to do in my spare time. My second job is death. In fact,” he says thoughtfully, “One could argue that being a Guardian is actually my second job. I mean, I did get it way more recently.”

 

“I know, Jack,” says Jamie. “You’re worth being friends with, even if your second job is death. I mean, you can’t really help it, can you? You can’t help being called, you can’t help it if they ask for i-”   
  
He’s cut off by Jack squeezing him so tight that it’s getting a little hard to breathe. Once Jack lets him go, he’s met by the spirit’s white-as-snow grin.

 

“I really thought you would hate me once you found out. I thought you hated me  _ yesterday. _ ” Jack laughs. “Oh man, I have never been more happy to be wrong.”

 

Jamie laughs with him, and they pull each other into another hug. For Jack, it means that his first believer has given him something else for the first time -  _ acceptance. _

 

It might just be the best thing he’s ever felt.

**Author's Note:**

> in all the versions i've seen of this concept, no one's written what jamie would think about it - so of course, i had to. 
> 
> also, i could definitely be persuaded to write a second chapter with the guardian's reactions in the comments below...
> 
> hmu on tumblr: aroacethetic-shitpost


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